FLASHBACK: WaPo reporter sues paper for not assigning her to cover Kavanaugh matter.

Felicia Sommez is a reporter for the Washington Post — part of the Post’s stable of lefty journalists. She has contributed to some of the dishonest anti-Trump stories we’ve critiqued on Power Line. See here, for example.

Sommez has sued the Post and some of its editors for alleged discrimination and retaliation. Her core complaint is that she has not been assigned to cover stories about alleged sexual assault and harassment, including the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

A few years ago, Sommez herself alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times while she was drunk. Later, she spoke publicly about her experience as a “survivor” of sexual assault.

As a result of her experience and her advocacy, the Post apparently barred her from covering such allegations by others. The Post’s theory, it seems, was that Sommez’s experience might affect her reporting or at least create the perception that her reporting was slanted.

Sommez says that as a result of missing out on these assignments, including the Kavanaugh story, her career has been harmed. In addition, she claims to have been “humiliated” to the point of suffering emotional distress and requiring therapy.

Also from last year: Journalists Are “Centering” Their “Trauma” Because It Enables Them To Acquire Power.

We can just take Sonmez at her word and grant that this professional adult journalist genuinely did undergo the debilitating trauma she described, vacant staring spells and all. It’s impossible to judge the precise veracity of these trauma-related claims anyway, given how inextricable they are with the interior mental state of the individual in question. So we’ll have to just accept that Sonmez being “attacked online,” as she put it, really did result in the kind of extraordinary psychological turmoil she says she experienced. (Here’s some additional background information on the other alleged sources of Sonmez’s trauma.) What can be judged, however — and what has to be judged given its rapidly increasing prominence in public life — is the wider impact of the rhetorical style used so adroitly by Sonmez. Because it very clearly gets results. Call it therapeutic trauma jargon.

And she’s still going strong today:

NOEM, THUNE SURVIVE GOP CHALLENGES FROM RIGHT IN SOUTH DAKOTA.

OLD AND BUSTED: What is a Woman?

The New Hotness? What is a Bee! California Court Puts Bees in Category Of Fish and Aquatic Life Under State Endagered Species Law.

Meanwhile, at the Bee itself: Child Playing In Meadow Stung By Fish.

LET THEM BUY TESLAS: Electric car owner Stabenow says gas prices don’t matter. “Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI): ‘On the issue of gas prices, I drove my electric vehicle from Michigan to here last weekend and went by every gas station and it didn’t matter how high it was.’”

I hope Stabenow won’t mind when video of her quote appears in numerous Republican campaign ads this fall.

RIP: Jim Seals, of soft rock duo Seals and Crofts, dies aged 80.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?

You may have noticed a bizarre trend at organizations whose staffs are full of younger liberals: Internal disputes aren’t kept internal anymore but are aired in public, on social media or in the press, with rampantly subordinate staff attacking their colleagues or decrying managerial decisions in full public view — and those actions apparently tolerated from the top.

In the most extreme cases, you get meltdowns like the one at the Dianne Morales campaign for mayor of New York, where staff went on strike to demand, among other things, that the campaign divert part of its budget away from campaigning into “community grocery giveaways.” But it’s especially a problem in the media, where so many employees have large social media followings they can use to put their employers on blast — and where those employers have (unwisely) cultivated a freewheeling social media culture where it’s common for reporters to comment on all sorts of matters unrelated to their coverage.

* * * * * * * * *

I hate that I’ve written so many paragraphs about this. I hate that I know so much about this dispute. It’s so high school, and it ought not to be any of our business. These are all internal HR matters. But Sonmez is explicit: She wages these fights in public because management is more responsive to that than when employees complain privately. By giving her “good friend” Weigel such a long suspension and doing nothing to her, management is only encouraging her and other Post employees to put their colleagues on blast more, which she has indeed been doing.

Airing internal workplace disputes in public like this is not okay, even when you are right on the merits. My statement isn’t just obvious, it’s how almost all organizations work. If you think your coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.

Even before the Times’ collective meltdown over Tom Cotton’s column in 2020, there were similar comparisons made about its own high school-like nature, such as Matthew Continetti’s 2014 Washington Free Beacon column:

Gossipy, catty, insular, cliquey, stressful, immature, cowardly, moody, underhanded, spiteful—the New York Times gives new meaning to the term “hostile workplace.” What has been said of the press—that it wields power without any sense of responsibility—is also a fair enough description of the young adult. And it is to high school, I think, that the New York Times is most aptly compared. The coverage of the Abramson firing reads at times like the plot of an episode of Saved By the Bell minus the sex: Someone always has a crazy idea, everyone’s feelings are always hurt, apologies and reconciliations are made and quickly sundered, confrontations are the subject of intense planning and preparation, and authority figures are youth-oriented, well-intentioned, bumbling, and inept.

Unexpectedly!

And as Glenn Greenwald noted over the weekend about the Post’s twitter spat:

Finally, note that the Fast Times at Ben Bradlee High drama at the Post this week is a distraction from what should be the real story emanating from the offices that once led to Watergate: Twitter saga obscures the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz scandal. “But the key point is this: Either Lorenz or her editors engaged in direct fabrication or a willful disregard for journalistic standards. The broader challenge is that those who run the Post have decided that Lorenz, and her continued shoddy reporting and broad generalizations, are worth the headache. Why they have decided as much is anyone’s guess. But as Lorenz continues to stretch the boundaries of ethical journalism, her Post colleagues will be the ones who share in the reputational damage.”

DEMOCRATS ADMIT THE TRUE PURPOSE OF J6 HEARINGS:

“FOX won’t televise the hearings of the greatest Crime in Presidential history,” tweeted Rob Reiner. “Our Democracy is hanging by a thread.” Cry me a river, Meathead.

The fact is, there’s only one reason why any network will air the hearings of these pointless, blatantly partisan hearings—and it has nothing to do with the so-called insurrection. It has to do with helping the Democrats in the upcoming midterms.

This isn’t a guess. They’ve already admitted to this. “Jan. 6 Hearings Give Democrats a Chance to Recast Midterm Message,” reads the headline at the New York Times about the hearings—showing absolutely no shame that government resources are being used for blatantly partisan purposes.

“With their control of Congress hanging in the balance, Democrats plan to use made-for-television moments and a carefully choreographed rollout of revelations over the course of six hearings…to persuade voters that the coming midterm elections are a chance to hold Republicans accountable for it,” the report explained.

The article goes on to quote Democrat lawmakers and operatives all but admitting the purpose of the hearings is to distract voters from astronomical gas prices and historic inflation.

We’ve been here before, of course: Warnings From Watergate for the January 6 Committee. “As midterm elections approach, Democrats face challenges eerily similar to those following President Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide reelection. Their response was a select committee to stage a legislative show trial where they controlled the agenda and disgraced witnesses could be called to account without the inconvenience of due process rights guaranteed by our Constitution. They appear to be following the same playbook today, half a century later. Times have changed, but Democrats’ willingness to abuse government power to punish political enemies hasn’t. Let’s jump inside their heads for a few moments (if you can bear it) to follow the logic of their plots.”

WHY TEAM BIDEN MIGHT BE PURPOSEFULLY GRINDING DOWN THE MIDDLE CLASS. Now in handy video form!

Wondering why gas has nearly doubled since Biden took office? Watch this. pic.twitter.com/X5tcDOPtT8

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 2, 2022

PRO-ABORTION TERRORISTS FIREBOMB BUFFALO PRO-LIFE PREGNANCY CENTER:

Pro-abortion terrorists firebombed a pro-life Christian pregnancy center in Buffalo, N.Y. on Tuesday, inflicting significant damage on the building and vandalizing the remains with their organization’s name.

Pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge, which has developed a reputation for resorting to violence, claimed responsibility for the attack, which left glass shattered and much of the interior of the CompassCare office burned and destroyed, CBN News reported.

The arsonists left graffiti on a wall that read, “Jane Was Here.” The organization has committed multiple such incidents in the last few months, including one in which it firebombed the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action (WFA), a pro-life group in Madison, Wis. last month. There, the terrorists left the message, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”

“Ironically, New York’s Governor not only ignored the violence but instead earmarked $35 million in taxpayer funds to increase security at abortion clinics,” CompassCare said in a statement. “Adding insult to injury the New York legislature passed a bill investigating pro-life pregnancy centers precisely because they do not perform abortions.”

Jane’s Revenge also admitted that it threw red paint on the the front door of a crisis pregnancy center in Washington, D.C. last week, spray painting “Jane Says Revenge” on the side of the building.

And of course, the left’s projection is on full display: Sick: Joy Reid Says GOP Doesn’t Want Dems to Feel Safe Anywhere in US.

YET ANOTHER NORMAL DAY AT THE WASHINGTON POST: A Twitter thread collated by Jim Treacher.

As Treacher sums it all up:

Related: Washington Post Editor Gets Tough in New Memo to Staff Over Online Behavior: ‘We Will Enforce Our Policies And Standards’ — and issue Manchurian Candidate-style talking points as well, apparently. It’s all so collegial there!

UPDATE: Question asked by Ace of Spades: “Do I have this wrong? Is this in fact a protest against the Post? Forbidden against speaking out against Somnez and her scalp-hunting, have they turned to protesting by heaping sarcastic praise on the Post?”

John Sexton of Hot Air agrees: “After further reflection, I suspect this is intended to be a response to Felicia Sonmez. Think about it. She got Dave Weigel suspended. She tried to get another employee suspended. Now she’s attacking the Post at length as a problematic workplace. And suddenly we get a bunch of employees saying people make mistakes (a reference to Weigel) but despite that the Post is a great place to work. I think this is meant to be a non-confrontational way of publicly disagreeing with Sonmez. In fact that’s the conclusion that [Glenn] Greenwald came around to eventually. Again, it is a bit creepy but given that the executive editor just warned the entire staff not to call out employees by name online, they can’t go after her directly. Nevertheless, there are a bunch of people at the Post who aren’t on board with what Felicia Sonmez is saying.”

JIM TREACHER: WaPo’s Dave Weigel Learns How Much His Loyalty to the Democrats Is Worth.

All this because Weigel laughed at a joke about women being crazy. Sonmez sure is proving him wrong, huh?

Right now I’m ambivalent about the whole thing. Weigel’s bosses have overreacted by suspending him for retweeting a dumb joke, but he sucks at his job anyway. Back in 2010, he should’ve taken the opportunity Tucker Carlson gave him and found a career more suited to his ethical framework. Like selling used cars.1 Busting him for such a minor infraction is sort of like the feds bringing down Al Capone for tax evasion.2

Well, if Felicia Sonmez manages to do what Tucker Carlson couldn’t, my hat is off to her. This is one of those rare situations where no matter who loses, I win.

And maybe Dave Weigel has learned something about the people he’s shown so much loyalty over the years. Maybe he’s learned how quickly and easily they’ll throw a guy to an angry mob, just to save themselves.

Maybe!

Iowahawk has a helpful photographic comparison to help understand just how far the Washington Post has fallen:

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM 1970, ALEX: How the left learned to stop worrying and love domestic terrorism.

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were arrested in the “mostly peaceful” protests following George Floyd’s murder. The two lawyers handed out Molotov cocktails to the crowd, and Rahman tossed one into a police car before fleeing the scene in Mattis’s van. They reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors in October 2020 that wiped out six of the seven charges against them. Those prosecutors, nonetheless, sought a maximum 10-year sentence and argued that the incident qualified for a so-called terrorism enhancement that would turbocharge sentencing—a determination with which the U.S. Probation Office concurred.

Ginning herself up to distribute explosives to the crowd, Rahman gave a video interview in which she declared, “This shit won’t ever stop until we fuckin’ take it all down,” adding that “the only way [the police] hear us is through violence.”

Then, Garland and the U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District, Breon Peace, who’s handling the prosecution, took office, and you won’t believe what happened next!

In mid-May, the same career DOJ prosecutors who argued for that 10-year sentence were back in court withdrawing their plea deal and entering a new one that allowed the defendants to cop to the lesser charge of conspiracy. It tosses out the terrorism enhancement entirely.

The new charge carries a five-year maximum sentence, but the prosecutors are urging the judge to go below that, asking for just 18 to 24 months on account of the “history and personal characteristics of the defendants” and the “aberrational nature of the defendants’ conduct.” Because, you know, Mattis graduated from Princeton and New York University Law School and was an attorney at the white-shoe law firm Pryor Cashman, and Rahman was a public-interest lawyer whose “best friend,” Obama administration intelligence official Salmah Rizvi, guaranteed the $250,000 required to release her on bail.

Law360, which reported on the events, calls the new deal an “unusual step.” James Trusty, a former prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s criminal division, broke it down for us this way: “Swapping in a softer plea agreement after having gone through the plea hearing is an exceedingly rare event in federal court.” It can happen, he said, if there is “truly some new development or understanding about the defendants that merits a fresh look.”

As Time magazine unironically noted in 2016, “In retrospect, it seems odd that the Federal Bureau of Investigation elevated a band of about one hundred young people, mostly college students, into a leading place on the Bureau’s Most Wanted List. The FBI decision garnered Weatherman a huge amount of publicity and made some of its leaders famous. Yet the Weather organization was minuscule. To be sure, it was almost unique among radicals in that period in using dynamite bombs to protest government war policies, racial unfairness and corporate greed. The Weathermen believed that the evil of these acts warranted an extreme response—in fact, it warranted a revolution. But Weather only set off a total of 25 such bombs during its entire seven years of existence, all of them relatively small. And fully half of those bombs were detonated early on, in 1970. After that, Weatherman on average set off only one bomb every six months, mostly in the bathrooms of government buildings and corporation headquarters.”

The “only” is a nice touch.

DON’T GET COCKY: CNN’s Harry Enten Predicts Republicans Take Huge House Majority: ‘Best Position… In Over 80 Years.’

GEORGIA DEMOCRATS FREAK OUT WHEN REPUBLICANS TAKE A PAGE FROM THEIR PLAYBOOK: “Like so many thorns in our sides here in Georgia, it all starts with Stacey Abrams. No doubt you’ve heard the stories of how her Fair Fight Action PAC took in $1.34 million and used it to pay off the medical debt of 68,000 Georgians, along with 40,000 others in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Fair Fight Action hasn’t stopped crowing about it — even buying ads one time here on PJ Media — highlighting how Stacey Abrams cares about Georgians because she took contributed money and doled it out like candy while calling for expanded government healthcare here in the state she loathes but wants to  run. And it’s no doubt when (not if) she runs for president, we’ll never hear the end of how she took care of people in five states. It was such a crass political move, but it was all totally cool in the eyes of the left. But let a Republican do something similar, and the Democrats go all ‘Katy, bar the door.’ Georgia Democrats are seeing red because a PAC supporting Georgia Bulldogs football star and Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker in his Senate bid gave out $25 gas vouchers to consumers in South Atlanta last weekend. There were no strings to the vouchers — no push to register to vote, to endorse Walker, or to appear in campaign commercials — the $25 was simply meant to help hard-working Georgians stretch their gas dollars a little farther.”

PACKIN’ HEAT: Nude Hunter Biden cavorts with hooker, illegal gun in latest mess for president.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Awful trigger discipline, too.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Common Sense? CBS Urges U.S. Adopt Japan’s Occupation-Era Gun Control.

On Monday’s CBS Mornings, the network continued their series globetrotting for gun control laws. This time they left Europe and jetted over to Japan where senior foreign correspondent (and friend to the Iranian regime) Elizabeth Palmer touted their oppressive system where a citizen could wait a year or longer to get a gun license as authorities prod their lives and a gun shop owners need to get permission to buy ammo. All imposed on them during the post-WWII occupation.

* * * * * * * *

Palmer was absolutely giddy to note that the reason Japan had such strict gun control laws was because of the United States. “And how’s this for ironic? Japan owes its strict gun laws to America,” she mocked. “When the U.S. occupied Japan after World War II it disarmed the country.”

She even threw in a soundbite from an old documentary where the narrator proclaimed: “To the scrap heap went the guns.” Palmer conveniently omitted the part where the U.S. also banned Japan from having a military.

“Americans shaped the legislation that took firearms out of the hands of civilians, and to this day, that means getting hurt or killed by a gun in Japan is an extremely long shot,” she jabbed as she wrapped up the report.

Palmer is essentially praising the American confiscation of firearms for there to be a smoother occupation and pacification of a citizenry, the exact opposite of what the founders intended. And given the fact that the Democratic Roosevelt administration put Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, perhaps looking to that era for guidance is ill-advised.

As Glenn has written, “our elites are now promoting the kind of history one would impose on a conquered nation, to break its people’s spirit.” But they’ve rarely made the connection so obvious until now.

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Biden White House neglects to mention anniversary of D-Day, second year in a row. Former presidents have acknowledged D-Day in some capacity during their first year in office.

With the 78th anniversary of D-Day nearly over, President Biden has so far failed to issue a statement on the historic day that was widely regarded as a decisive turning point during World War II.

The snub marked the second year in a row the Biden White House failed to issue any kind of statement on the anniversary.

The nearest military-related tweeted on the president’s Twitter feed includes a shout-out to Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman to serve as Commandant of the Coast Guard, and the first woman to lead any branch of the Armed Forces.

Not sure what happened last year, but perhaps this December WaPo article gives President Klain an excuse for this year’s snub: Washington Post Discovers World War II-Era Survey, Cancels the Greatest Generation.

Fox News noted, however, that there seemed to be an ulterior motive in the presentation of this “uncensored” material. “Critics took to social media to blast The Post’s framing of the surveys, with some questioning the desire to view people in the 1940s through a 21st-century lens, and others suggesting that there was now an ongoing effort to cancel the grandparents of some Americans.” Nick Timothy, a columnist for the UK’s Telegraph, tweeted: “Next you’ll be telling me William Wilberforce wasn’t in the Parliamentary LGBTQ society, and Gandhi didn’t support Black Lives Matter. Historical figures lived with different social and moral norms. This is not news, or a novel academic discovery.”

Indeed. It is noteworthy also that the Post saw fit to highlight, out of 65,000 pages of surveys, racist and sexist remarks, rather than material that might have provided insight into the challenges that the men who won World War II faced and the difficulties they overcame. The Post’s article, and apparently the entire Virginia Tech project, if its focus is reflected accurately in the article, is akin to the pulling down of statues that has become a fad all over the country. The Left wants Americans to be ashamed of our history. Washington? Jefferson? Not statesmen, not men of courage, not key framers of the most successful republic and freest society the world has ever known, but just racist slaveowners, to be repudiated and abhorred, not respected or celebrated. Lincoln? He didn’t free the slaves; that’s the “white savior complex.” He, too, must be rejected as a racist, paternalist white supremacist. The Greatest Generation? Yes, they fought and won World War II and came home and made the United States the greatest power on earth, but you see, they did not hold woke attitudes.

In accordance with the prophesy:

As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018, “Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.”

The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.

What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.

And plenty of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” as well. “It is defined as the belief that ‘the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.’ If we add, ‘and therefore wrong and also racist’ to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs. Historian Larry Taunton defines it as ‘imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.’”

UPDATE:

IT’S COME TO THIS: NFL team appoints first openly transgender cheerleader.

Charlotte-based NFL team the Carolina Panthers have added a male cheerleader who identifies as a female to its roster of cheerleaders.

In an announcement this week through Instagram, Justine Simone Lindsay, who identifies as transgender, stated “you are looking at the newest member of the Carolina Panthers TopCats cheerleader’s as the first Transgender female.” [sic] would like to thank the beautiful and talented dancers who supported me along the way, alumni, TopCats family, and friends for your love and support. I would not have gotten to this moment in my life if it wasn’t for the support,” wrote Lindsay. “Also to my beautiful coach [Chandalae Lanouette] you are a special being that I truly cherish thank you taking that leap of faith on me to be apart of your legacy and so many others.”

“This is a moment I will never forget and I cannot wait to show you all what this girl has to bring,” the cheerleader added. “Thank you [TopCats] a dream come true.”

For the past few seasons, the Panthers’ record has been 7-9, 5-11, 5-11, 5-12. I’m glad they’ve sorted out their football team’s myriad problems so that they can now focus on the important issues.

CNN: RISING GAS PRICES ARE BAD NEWS FOR DEMOCRATS.

CNN had two of their reporters on air for a segment on rising gas prices today and the news from both of them was bad news for Democrats. First up was senior data reporter Harry Enten who talked about how gas prices might impact the midterms.

“This year is off the charts, right? It’s ridiculously high, the growth rate right now,” Enten said. He continued, “I’ve done this a few times on air and each time the now number goes up, up and up and up.” He was referring to this graphic seen above which shows the current surge in gas prices is higher than in previous midterm cycles.

Enten said the correlation to bad news for the incumbent party wasn’t perfect but in this case the gas prices are part of a “larger economic context” all of which boils down to Americans being “really not happy at this point.” Enten went on to point out that the economy was far and away the top issue. Other issues like gun control and abortion don’t even come close.

Next up was reporter Matt Egan who was doing a stand-up from a gas station in New York. “Unfortunately, probably no relief is coming and people are not happy about it,” Egan said. “At this gas station in Manhattan gas is now selling for $6 a gallon,” he said.

Just a few days ago, Ed [Morrissey] noted that analysts were predicting regular gas could hit $5 a gallon by June 17. But according to AAA, the national average is up 25 cents in the past week to $4.86. Now Tom Kloza, the energy analyst who tracks prices for AAA, says $5 a gallon gas could happen as soon as this weekend.

Of course CNN reporters are surprised by this development, because it was actually predicted by a debate televised on CNN in 2019, which even they didn’t bother to watch: In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”

And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”

Or as Glenn asked last week in his New York Post column, “So does the Biden administration actually want to see middle-class Americans reduced to poverty and privation? Or is it just too stupid to foresee the obvious consequences of its own actions? At this point, I’m not even sure which is worse. But with the midterms coming, no amount of talk about gun control, abortion or other Democratic hot-button issues is going to distract Americans from what’s happening to their pocketbooks. Good.”

Flashbacks:

● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?

● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.

● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”

Exit quote: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”

In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden:  As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

Speaking of the Obama era, this 2012 CNN headline is a classic: Opinion: America, quit whining about gas.

Fuel is a drug the U.S. has long since needed weaning off. Admittedly Americans have to cover greater distances than Europeans. But you don’t need a glorified double bed powered by a throbbing great V8 to do that. A sensibly-sized car with a two-liter turbo will do the job just as comfortably.

And with developing nations such as China, Brazil and India demanding ever more fuel, the planet can’t put up with anyone’s penchant for gas-guzzling monsters any more.

But if the European experience is anything to go by, the $4 gallon isn’t going to alter driving habits dramatically. America needs petrol prices to double if people are to permanently park up their 15mpg pick-up trucks. Maybe then it’ll elicit a bit of sympathy from over here.

Curiously, with midterms looming, DNC-CNN isn’t running similar pieces this year.

Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.

Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

UPDATE: Father on MSNBC Summarizes How Bad Democrats Are Getting Shellacked in November With One Perfect Sentence. “One administration had cheaper gas and this administration has more expensive gas.”

Why aren’t American voters appreciating Biden’s self-declared “incredible transition?!” Biden praises high gas prices as part of ‘incredible transition’ of the US economy away from fossil fuels.

(Updated and bumped.)

EX-MEDIA MATTERS EMPLOYEE: THERE WAS A SEXUAL PREDATOR CREEPING AROUND THAT OFFICE.

Does every lefty outlet employ sexual predators? I thought the Lincoln Project was peak creepiness, having a co-founder who was very inappropriate with young men. Then, the endless stories of teachers being totally weird with their students. I’m not talking high school. I’m talking pre-teens, even kindergartners. I don’t need to go into details about that. To make matters worse, we have school districts, like the one in Loudoun County, Virginia, who pretty much covered up a sexual assault because the perpetrator was reportedly gender-fluid. It’s a dumpster fire. Now, the Left’s main media bias watchdog, Media Matters, is facing an allegation that they employed a sexual predator. It was made by a now-ex-employee.

Why is the left such a cesspit of abuse?

WELCOME BACK, CARTER! White House worried about Jimmy Carter parallels to Biden presidency as approval rating remains low: report.

The Biden White House is reportedly worried that the parallels to former President Jimmy Carter’s presidency are going to stick as gas prices and inflation continue to increase and the president’s approval rating remains low.

Politico reported on Sunday that President Biden and his aides were feeling defeated by their efforts to counteract the many challenges the Biden administration currently faces.

“Morale inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is plummeting amid growing fears that the parallels to Jimmy Carter, another first-term Democrat plagued by soaring prices and a foreign policy morass, will stick,” Politico’s Jonathan Lemire wrote.

The White House’s plan is to get Biden out on the road to talk about his progress, and they hope to pile on their attacks against the GOP and paint the party as too extreme, highlighting the issues of gun control and abortion.

Biden is reportedly very frustrated that his approval rating has dipped below former President Donald Trump’s, who Biden believes is the “worst president.”

The report says that the president “erupted” over not being kept up to speed about the baby formula shortage. The president reportedly went against his staffer’s advice when he declared the news of the shortage reached him.

So when does Biden do something about his staff? When Does Joe Biden Start Firing People?

Biden could put a stop to the public walkbacks immediately by firing one or more people for publicly contradicting him. There are two overlapping reasons why he hasn’t done that: He isn’t willing to stand up to his own staff, and at some level, he grasps that they keep walking back things that he should never have said in the first place. If you have spent much time around elderly men with declining faculties, you will recognize the all-too-common pattern of lashing out because they need help for things they could once do themselves, rather than being thankful for the help.

Earlier: “I see the contrast coming into view. Joe Biden is making Jimmy Carter look like a good president.”

Was this the moment when everything went pear-shaped?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I paid $5.19 for gasoline today. In Knoxville where it’s usually cheap.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Would You Believe San Francisco’s Too Right-Wing?

“In some sense, there are two San Franciscos,” New York Magazine’s Ross Barkan stipulates. There is the city you know and have known for decades, which has incubated a political culture well to the left of nearly any other major American metropolitan area. But there is another San Francisco, he adds; a city that is profoundly conventional and even a little right-wing.

“Modern San Francisco, unlike New York, does not rest on the legacy of a social-democratic state forged with New Deal largesse,” Barkan continues. “From 1912 to 1963, only Republicans governed San Francisco, and they were largely backers of big business who could occasionally draw support from organized labor.” The city, therefore, lacks a deeply rooted working-class population that could ballast progressive politicians at the polls. Likewise, San Francisco’s “black population is declining,” robbing the city of an African-American political establishment. And while Silicon Valley casts a progressive gloss over the city, the members of this wealthy caste resent the “visible poverty” and squalor that has become a feature of their daily life.

You might not expect a city that hasn’t elected a Republican to the mayoralty for a half-century—a city that leans Democratic to the tune of 38 points and has sent Nancy Pelosi to Congress every two years since Ronald Reagan was in the White House—to be a hotbed of conservative thought. And yet, the city’s current mayor, London Breed, “exists somewhere on an ideological spectrum to the right of Bill de Blasio,” and even she has left Boudin for dead. It’s hardly a feat to position yourself to the right of a one-time socialist who raised money for the Sandinistas and honeymooned in Communist Cuba, but you have to take your Bay Area right-wingers as they come. In fact, Breed backed the movement to defund police departments and went so far as to cut $120 million from her city’s law-enforcement budget when that was the faddish thing to do. She only saw the light when crime rates in her city exploded, and the law-abiding public went on a recall frenzy.

Barkan notes that Boudin is cut from the same cloth as other progressive prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and St. Louis’s Wesley Bell. Indeed, that is the problem.

As New York Times owner Tom Cotton wrote in December: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

KYLE SMITH: From Watergate to whinegate: The Washington Post is a hot mess.

The Washington Post, June 1972: Two dogged reporters patiently dig into the details of a strange burglary at Democratic Party headquarters, diligently assemble facts, cultivate sources and put together a package of revelations that will lead to the first presidential resignation in history.

The Washington Post, exactly half a century later: Two Mean Girl basket cases spend an entire weekend crazily lurching around spitting inane accusations at their colleagues for microaggressing them. The more people laugh, the louder they cry, “I’m being endangered!”

How institutions change. The 145-year-old paper was once personified by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: “Woodstein.” This weekend the WaPo’s reputation was effectively redefined by MezRenz: Felicia Sonmez and Taylor Lorenz, each of whom brought shame on the paper over nothing.

The proximate cause of this spastic overreaction was a joke, retweeted by WaPo reporter Dave Weigel, that suggested all women are either bisexual or bipolar. This kind of “Bitches be craaaaazy!” joke died out in the ’80s, and Weigel shouldn’t have retweeted it, but Sonmez clearly was trying to get Weigel fired or severely punished when she re-tweeted Weigel’s retweet with a sarcastic note that it was “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” Weigel was already being corrected internally, so there was no need to take this public on Twitter, and he shortly deleted and apologized. That should have been the end of it.

And the hits just keep on coming! The Washington Post suspends reporter David Weigel over sexist retweet.

As Saagar Enjeti tweets, “Just so we’re all clear: Taylor Lorenz can literally lie and violate basic standards and gets no punishment. Felicia can leak her bosses emails, violate company policy and harass her coworkers and is good to go. Dave Weigel shitposts and he’s suspended w/o pay for a month.”

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Biden Caught Telling Gross Lie About Gun Manufacturers in Latest Speech.

IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? OF COURSE IT IS: Former New York Times Reporter Denies in New Book That Hugo Chávez Was a Socialist.

(Classical reference in headline.)